Hiring and recruitment of candidates for a position of employment is generally a long, complex process. Generally, the process operates as follows. First, an HR department of a company or organization will identify that there is a vacancy in a particular position or identify that there is a need to create a new position. HR must then identify what the duties and responsibilities of the position will be, and must establish minimum requirements, preferred qualifications, and a recruitment strategy for the position.
Then, HR must develop a position description to be provided to the public. This typically must balance factors like accurately describing the duties and responsibilities of the job while preserving appropriate levels of secrecy about how the organization operates, ensuring that the position description ranks high in the search results of a number of search engines, ensuring that the position description promotes the company, and ensuring that the posting complies with labor law.
While some recruitment is often done in-house (usually through a jobs board operated by the organization, or through an in-house recruiter if the organization is sufficiently large and has sufficient turnover), the task of recruiting candidates for the position is sufficiently onerous and specialized that, most often, recruitment is contracted out to a recruiter or staffing agency. The recruiter will, based on the position description developed by the company, attempt to source a number of appropriate candidates for the position and ensure that the candidates are appropriately qualified.
The process of “sourcing” a candidate refers to the process of proactively searching for qualified job candidates for positions which are currently open or which are planned to be open. Sourcing thus requires collecting relevant data about qualified candidates, such as their names, titles, and job responsibilities. This is targeted at both candidates who are not actively looking for job opportunities (passive job seekers) and candidates who are actively looking for job opportunities (active job seekers). Both passive and active job seekers are most often targeted based on digital job boards, social media, and based on various forms of networking, such as through professional or alumni organizations.
Countless hours are typically spent by recruiters on both sourcing and qualifying candidates for job openings, meaning that this process can often be expensive, particularly for a company that contracts out its recruitment. The widespread adoption of digital job boards have meant that the volume of résumés and applications has increased significantly, making this task progressively more difficult.